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Month: April 2007

I was there yesterday. Gave a talk at the Web 2.0 open and spent the rest of the day listening to talks, catching up with friends. The talk that I enjoyed the most was David Hornik’s presentation: What I Learned from Syphilis: Epidemiology & Viral Marketing. The talk was about how to apply lessons from successful viruses to web apps. David is an engaging speaker and his approach made you think about the problem of virality of web apps from a different angle.

Duncan Watts (author of Six Degrees) wrote an article in the New York Times about the rich get richer effect (via). He reports on a series of experiments on the web where they tracked the rise in popularity of music in different “parallel worlds” where participants could either see what others were doing (social influence condition) or not (individual conditon). Their main findings were that in the social influence condition (where participants could see what others were doing), the hits were much more popular (and unpopular songs more unpopular) than in the individual condition (where participants could not see what others were doing).

I love Basecamp. Have been using it for pretty much from the beginning. I would love to keep on using it. But it just is not keeping up with us.

Basecamp is great for short term consulting projects. Sometimes, it was hard to get clients to post to Basecamp instead of emailing. But overall, it worked well for communication. After the end of the project as well, it serves as an archive, letting me go back and get an overview of project, look at associated files etc., whenever I want to.

Though my beginning is this field was with search, in recent years, I have not focused on it. Expect that to change, as we increasingly focus on search with SlideShare. A huge part of what we are doing is to webify the content locked up in powerpoint and other presentation files. Webifying the content means enabling it to be found by anyone who might be interested. It means search. We realize that our search sucked (there is no other way to describe it) and we did not want users to wait while we fixed it. So, the first step was simply to outsource the problem to Google – meaning use their custom site search. However, this is simply a starting point. We expect to come back and build other types of advanced search more suited to the specific nature and format of the content on SlideShare.

The second issue I am increasingly interested in is Advertising. As you can imagine, that is something we are playing around with on SlideShare. We want to get more experimental – trying more formats and placements – both with Google ads (which we currently have and on our own) and on our own.

So readers, what blogs should I start reading as I pursue this interest? Are there any books/articles that are a must read?

Next Tuesday, on April 10th, BayCHI will host two speakers who will talk about design from very different perspectives. Kelly Goto will talk about Designing for lifestyle while Dan Saffer will talk about Learning Interaction Design from Las Vegas. RSVP on Upcoming if you are planning to come by (though you don’t have to). Some of us might head out for drinks later if you want to join us (email me about that).

I came across this article by Jeremy Liew about how game mechanics can be applied to social media. He was referring to how many of the principles of game design can apply to social sharing sites. For example, easy to learn, hard to master, collecting things, providing feedback etc. I have been talking about similar issues in my “Designing for Social Sharing” talk for a little while now. And like with him, I have been inspired by Amy Jo Kim’s work. Another inspiration has been Katrin Knorr’s Cetina’s work on object-centered sociality and its interpretation by Jyri Engeström.

After all, what are sites like YouTube or SlideShare, but places for massively-multiplayer sharing of digital objects like photos, slides or video, kind of like MMORPGS, but different. Now, if only we could come up with another equally awkward acronym for these sites? How about MMOS – Massively Multiplayer Online Sharing OR maybe MMOOS or Massively Multiplayer Online Object Sharing? Thats not nearly awakward enough! Anyone else want to have a go at an acronym? Share below.

I was asked to do the closing plenery at the IA Summit this year. This is a real honor and I thought for a long time about what I wanted to talk about. I ended up talking about designing SlideShare and why we did not use many of the typical UX methods and tools for that. Instead we opted for an agile design process that works well with fast-paced development of a social (ok, I will use the word – “Web2.0”) application.

Update: Alberto Mucignat has a point by point analysis of my talk – in Italian!. Go here for original Italian version and here for Google translation.